Saturday, November 15, 2008

Blogs these days are way more open than when I started typing. My favorite illustration of this sentiment is "Amanda" who after years of successfully running a series of websites as a lesbian finally admitted to being a man. Sure, there were all kinds of speculations and no one understood why "she" of the webcam whoredom hookup didn't have one of her own but there was no proof. So we continued assuming Amanda was a licentious Canadian lesbian with a penchant for insomnia and 2-d yahoo gaming.

Of course these days he'd never get away with it. The internet is shrinking, everyone has access to digital pictures, social networking sites are blazing intimate details of our lives in short bio answers and we all google. So how do you establish an on-line persona? More importantly, how do you first check to see who's persona you may be intruding on?

The site is simple. I have a stack of web app urls, the application pings the site using the username you want to check, if it returns a "no user name" error we return that. The site uses Dojo as it does all the checks using Ajax (each check takes a couple of seconds so using Ajax you don't have to sit and wait 3 minutes for the page to load).

A quick search of "Anny" showed the name being used on most of the 68 sites checked which doesn't surprise me since its a moderately popular dominican and asian name. Go check out your on-line name - you'll probably be surprised by the places its been.